Now that January’s coming to a close, how are you holding up with your New Year’s resolution? Struggling? Given up already? Or, like a rare few among us, are you still going strong?
Well, I’m here to tell you that (1) it’s totally normal to fall off the horse and have a hard time to get back on it after (particularly if the horse bucked you off first and then kicked you in the teeth), and (2) you can trick your brain into starting fresh again!
Because the point, of course, is that you still hit those important goals, even if there’s a delay (better late than never, right?).
So, first of all, if you’ve missed your targets, don’t try to catch up by tackling on the gap from before to what you can physically (and mentally) do now. This would be adding too much stress on yourself, and potentially make you drown in Overwhelm, which make you even less likely to hit your goals this time around, and then make you feel even worse later (which could potentially induce you to quit altogether). For instance, if you had targeted to hit 50K new words on that novel of yours by the end of January (a reasonable goal for yourself because you know you can hit 2000 words a day without straining too hard), don’t suddenly tell yourself that you need to hit 50K words + the missing 25K words for February (which would mean you should be able to write close to 3K words per day). You should also stop wallowing in your supposed failure–all those negative emotions are not going to help you toward your goal.
Instead, wipe the slate clean. Do congratulate yourself for managing to already make some progress at all this month (it’s VERY important to get encouragement along your way to your goal, most especially from yourself), and then set yourself up for a fresh Restart.
So what is a Restart? It is a way to trick your mind into garnering the power of what Katie Milkman calls “the Fresh Start Effect.” (1) This effect is why new year’s resolutions, though not successful with most people, still have a higher success rate than randomly-set goals. New Year’s is a typical one, but so is the half-year, or your birthday, a new job, a death, or any date to which you attribute some kind of importance, essentially. Which means it could be February 1, if that’s your wish.
Why does doing a Restart work with respect to successfully pursuing your aspirations?
The reason, according to the paper, comes down to essentially recalibrating your brain by:
- Create a clear break in your own timeline (a new chapter, if you will), so that you no longer consider your past mistakes or imperfections (negative feelings) but instead…
- You focus on the big, forward-looking (positive) picture.
You’re essentially turning the page, closing a chapter in your life, and starting a new one.
This new way of approaching your life and your goals will ensure that you remain more positive than negative, and that you’ll continuously “fail forward” as Dean Wesley Smith likes to say. The latter being that you set yourself ambitious, but doable goals (you do need to feel the stretch, that you’re pushing yourself to some level, but not so much that you break or give up altogether). At the end of the period (the year, the semester, the quarter, the month, the week…), even if you haven’t hit your goal, you’ve still made progress vs. where you started, which is the whole point!
Finally, here’s something I regularly have to remind myself of: Enjoy the process, including the struggle of pushing yourself! Focusing on that, more than on the product (or reaching said goal), ensures you do not wallow in despair when/if you miss your target. It’s more about the journey than the destination, as people like to say.
So, what your new goal for February? You now have 1 week left to ramp up to hit your wanted stride 🙂 And if you miss? Dust yourself off, congratulate yourself on being where you are already, and then hit restart again!
Sources:
(1) The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior, by Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman, Jason Riis